Modern telecommunication systems include many communication interfaces and communication protocols. New technologies are being designed and old systems are developed, so there are many product generations on the market. Communication protocols are being developed as well and, as a consequence, several protocol versions are applied concurrently.
Therefore, interfacing is very challenging due to the fact that many protocols and systems are in available and in concurrent use. Additionally, some protocol versions may have bugs, errors, or variants. A conventional interface is designed and dedicated to one type of protocol or are fixed to support selected multiple protocols.
A typical protocol message processing block consists of dedicated hardware components and software components. The hardware is typically a limiting part because it is difficult to modify and expand to other interfaces or other protocols. The software part is naturally more flexible, but in this case it is commonly integrated and embedded to the hardware, and it cannot be modified during the operation.
Another challenge is very fast data streams, e.g. over 100 Gigabits per second. This means that the message processing must be very fast in order not to create a bottleneck for the system. Due to that and the fact that a pure software solution on a general purpose processor is not fast enough, a combined hardware and software solution is mostly preferred.
These characteristics of the conventional systems lead to a very complex system if there is requirement of processing messages of multiple protocols, because a dedicated message processing block needs to be provided for each protocol.
An example of an application area of such message processors is mobile network base stations, other wireless network base stations and nodes, IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) systems, datacenters and their data nodes, and any telecommunication systems which may require fast message processing and/or protocol transforming due to latency and/or data rate requirements.